4

MONG CLAMBERED TO his feet and wandered to the water’s edge. I dropped my pacifier and joined him. ‘You’re a lucky bastard. You know that?’

He hesitated for a moment, then gave me a quick nod. He didn’t take his eyes off the scum that swirled across the sand in front of us.

‘I remember half of B Squadron telling you to steer clear of Tracy – but only because they wanted to have a crack at her themselves. They didn’t see what you saw in her. She’s in love, mate. And that’s with you, not with any other fucker. Just you.’ I pointed a finger at him like it was a bollocking.

‘You’ve got each other, that’s all that matters. Fuck BB, fuck ’em all. Just think how many of us’ve messed that up – BB included. They’re jealous of you two. We all are.’

He nodded again.

‘Why don’t you just pack up and fuck off out of Hereford? Why stay?’ In the film version of Mong and Tracy’s life that played in my mind, they would have packed up and gone to live where nobody knew them as soon as he’d left the Regiment. Like Shrek, but without the swamp.

Mong put up with a load of shit from BB, but a whole lot more of it was dealt behind his back. He was too big and fearsome for anyone else to say it to his face.

He shrugged. ‘Tracy wants to be near her mum and sister. She’s a family girl.’

I felt the corners of my mouth twitch into a smile. ‘No wonder they all think you’re soft in the head.’

He wasn’t. They were forgetting what he did for a living. And they mistook kindness for weakness. The stupid fucker was still sending cash to a woman he bumped into when he was in the Marines. He was at the checkout in Tesco one Saturday with three of his mates, each hefting a box of Stella, ready to watch the rugby. She was ahead of them, moaning that she couldn’t afford to buy nappies – one of the oldest cons in the book, but Mong was suckered. He paid for all the beer, paid for the Pampers too, and hadn’t stopped since. The baby had to be about twelve years old by now, and he was still sending her money.

Mong always had been a sucker when it came to kids. He was godfather to enough of them to make a football team. He and Tracy still hadn’t had kids of their own, and I was pretty sure that hurt. But it wasn’t something he spoke about, so I’d never asked.

Mong waded through the plastic bags and bottles and into the sea. ‘Nick?’ he shouted, over the roar of the surf.

‘I’m not washing your back.’

‘If anything happens to me – if I get dropped – you’ll look after her, won’t you?’

He made a bit of a meal of splashing his face in the water to avoid eye-to-eye. I knew it was difficult for him to be this emotional. Fucking hell, he wasn’t the only one.

‘Nothing’s going to happen, is it? Unless you spend too much time in your paddling pool with that lot …’ About twenty metres in front of Mong another three bloated bodies bobbed among the shit coming in on the waves. I nodded in their direction. ‘Otherwise the only thing that could go wrong on this job is that cunt ODing on protein powder.’

He didn’t laugh. He wasn’t in that kind of mood. ‘Everything’s good at home. I mean really. But the good stuff never lasts that long for me. You know what I mean?’

He got swiped by a tumbling body as he came out of the surf. He stepped aside with the deftness of a wing forward dodging a tackle. His clothes clung to him like a second skin. ‘Keep her safe, yeah?’

‘I already told you, mate, of course I will. But it’s not as if I’m going to have to.’

He gave his eyes another wipe as we walked back towards the tents.

I glanced across at him and was rewarded with a sheepish grin. ‘Fucking sand.’